Alice in Wonderland Wondering About

¶ … Alice in Wonderland

Wondering about Wonderland

At first reading at a very young age, Alice in Wonderland held me spellbound. The marvelous imagination and wit of the story and characters was so entertaining that I never looked further until I began to learn something of Victorian England through studying literature. Then I began to see some of the parallels, and I discovered that scholars had actually written about this. While the stories may have been intended to entertain young girls, the author was, indeed, communicating to a second adult audience. Much of this is lost on readers not of British origin, as we simply do not have enough background to "get it." We are not in on the jokes.

No other books written for children are more in need of explication than the Alice books,' writes Gardner. 'Much of their wit is interwoven with Victorian events and customs unfamiliar to American readers today, and even to readers in England. Many jokes in the books could be appreciated only by Oxford residents, and others were private jokes intended solely for Alice.'... The White Rabbit mistakenly refers to Alice as "Mary Ann" because that name served as a British euphemism for "servant girl"; and that "Mary Ann" also was a slang term for the guillotine during the French Revolution. 'It is probably coincidental that Carroll's use of the name anticipates the obsession with beheading' of the Queen of Hearts."

Roberts 32)

In looking further, we should re-examine the conversations in the book, and even the various things which happen to Alice. Victorian "ladies" were totally preoccupied with appearance, and went to extreme measures to stay very thin. Corsets made their waists even smaller, and tended to make the ladies faint, since they could not breathe. Alice becomes a giant from one bite of a cookie.

A journal article by Rose Lovell-Smith does a dandy job of explaining the presence of so many animals in Wonderland as parallel symbols for the Victorian class system, and the way these animals talk is not at all innocent or meant for children, but results in sharp criticism of Victorian society.

I think Denis Crutch is also roughly right... there is in Alice a hierarchy of animals equivalent to the Victorian class system but also suggesting a competitive model of nature: the white rabbit, caterpillar, and March Hare seem to be gentlemen, frog and fish are footmen, Bill the lizard is bullied by everybody, hedgehogs and flamingos are made use of, and the dormouse and the guinea pigs are victimized by larger animals and by humans."

Lovell-Smith)

Alice makes many cutting political comments herself. While I always found these to be extremely entertaining, I never connected them to the politics of the time. I did catch some of the timeless joked, like Alice stating that in life, "one must either eat or be eaten." I was always quite entertained by the little "nuggets of wisdom" in this book, quotes by all kinds of animals and people. It requires concentrated consideration to really make sense of some of it, but it never feels like nonsense, but rather a witty way of poking fun at the utter nonsense of politics and social structures. You do not have to be British to get some of the timeless jokes, such as why the little Mad Hatter's group celebrates the un-birthday: there are more of them.

The illustrations of Carrol and his friend, Teniel, actually extend the symbolism of the story, especially regarding liberties taken with perspective and scale. Miller noted how Teniel's illustration actually increased the value of the work, that they were literature, often critical, of themselves.

Once in a great while books are illustrated in the spirit of the original but it requires the extraordinary ability, in the artist, to create on the same plane as the author. The work then takes on a different and increased value, becomes, in fact, a new work of art. It is impossible to think of Alice in Wonderland except as Tenniel illustrated it."